Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

by Dee Brown

  At the White House reception the Sioux were more impressed by the hundreds of blazing candles in glittering chandeliers than they were by the Great Father and his cabinet members, the foreign diplomats, and congressmen who had come to stare at these wild men in the midst of Washington. Spotted Tail, who enjoyed good food, especially liked the strawberries and ice cream. "Surely the white men have many more good things to eat than they send to the Indians," he remarked.

  During the next few days, Donehogawa set about bargaining with Red Cloud and Spotted Tail. To obtain a permanent peace, he had to know exactly what they wanted so that he could balance this against the pressures of politicians representing white men who wanted the Indians' land. It was not an enviable position for a sympathetic Indian to be in. He arranged a meeting at the Interior Department, inviting representatives from all branches of the government to meet with the Sioux visitors.

  Secretary of the Interior Jacob Cox opened the proceedings with the sort of oration these Indians had heard many times before. The government would like to give the Indians arms and ammunition for hunting, Cox said, but could not do this until it was sure all the Indians were at peace. "Keep the peace," he concluded, "and then we will do what is right for you." He said nothing about the Sioux reservation on the Missouri.

  Red Cloud responded by shaking hands with Secretary Cox and the other officials. "Look at me," he said. "I was raised on this land where the sun rises-now I come from where the sun sets. Whose voice was first sounded on this land?

  The voice of the red people who had but bows and arrows.

  The Great Father says he is good and kind to us. I don't think so. I am good to his white people. From the word sent me I have come all the way to his house. My face is red; yours is white. The Great Spirit has made you to read and write, but not me. I have not learned. I come here to tell my Great Father what I do not like in my country. You are all close to the Great father, and are a great many chiefs. The men the Great Father sends to us have no sense-no heart.

  "I do not want my reservation on the Missouri; this is the fourth time I have said so." He stopped for a moment, and gestured toward Spotted Tail and the Brule delegation.

  "Here are some people from there now. Their children are dying off like sheep; the country does not suit them. I was born at the forks of the Platte and I was told that the land belonged to me from north, south, east, and west. . When you send goods to me, they are stolen all along the road, so when they reached me they were only a handful. They held a paper for me to sign, and that is all I got for my land. I know the people you send out there are liars. Look at me. I am poor and naked. I do not want war with my government. I want you to tell all this to my Great Father."

  Donehogawa of the Iroquois, the commissioner, replied:

  "We will tell the President what Red Cloud has said today.

  The President told me he would talk with Red Cloud very soon."Red Cloud looked at the red man who had learned to read and write and who was now the Little Father of the Indians. "You might grant my people the powder we ask,"

  he said. "We are but a handful, and you are a great and powerful nation. You make all the ammunition; all I ask is enough for my people to kill game. The Great Spirit has made all things that I have in my country wild. I have to hunt them up; it is not like you, who go out and find what you want. I have eyes; I see all you whites, what you are doing, raising stock, and so forth. I know I will have to come to that in a few years myself ; it is good. I have no more to say."

  The other Indians, Oglalas and Brules, crowded around the commissioner, all wishing to speak with him, the red man who had become their Little Father.

  The meeting with President Grant was on June 9, in the executive office of the White House. Red Cloud repeated much of what he had said at the Interior Department, emphasizing that his people did not want to live on the Missouri River. The treaty of 1868, he added, gave them the right to trade at Fort Laramie and have an agency on the Platte. Grant avoided a direct reply, but he promised to see that justice was done the Sioux. The President knew that the treaty ratified by Congress made no mention of fort Laramie or the Platte; it specifically stated that the Sioux agency was to be "at some place on the Missouri." Privately he suggested to Secretary Cox and Commissioner Parker that they call the Indians together the next day and explain to them the terms of the treaty.

  Donehogawa spent a restless night; he knew the Sioux had been tricked. When the printed treaty was read and explained to them, they would not like what they heard.

  Next morning at the Interior Department, Secretary Cox went through the treaty point by point, while Red Cloud listened patiently to the slow interpretation of the English words. When it was finished he declared firmly: "This is the first time I have heard of such a treaty. I never heard of it and do not mean to follow it."

  Secretary Cox replied that he did not believe any of the peace commissioners at Laramie would have told a lie about the treaty.

  "I did not say the commissioners lied," Red Cloud retorted,

  "but the interpreters were wrong. When the soldiers left the forts, I signed a treaty of peace, but it was not this treaty. We want to straighten things up." He arose and started to leave the room. Cox offered him a copy of the treaty, suggesting that he have his own interpreter explain it to him and then they would discuss it at another meeting. "I will not take the paper with me," Red Cloud replied. "It is all lies."

  That night in their hotel the Sioux talked of going home the next, day. Some said they were ashamed to go home to tell their people how they had been lied to and cheated into signing the treaty of 1868. It would be better to die there in Washington.

  Only the intercession of Donehogawa, the Little Father, persuaded them to come back for one more meeting. He promised to help them interpret the treaty in a better way.

  He had seen President Grant and convinced him that there was a solution to the difficulty.

  At the Interior Department, next morning Donehogawa greeted the Sioux by saying simply that Secretary Cox would explain the new interpretation of the treaty. Cox spoke briefly. He was sorry that Red Cloud and his people had misunderstood. Although the Powder River country was outside the permanent reservation, it was inside the part reserved for hunting grounds. If some of the Sioux preferred to live on their hunting grounds instead of inside the reservation, they could do so. Nor would they have to go to the reservation to trade and receive their goods.

  And so for the second time in two years, Red Cloud won a victory over the United States government, but this time he had the help of an Iroquois. He acknowledged this by coming forward and shaking the commissioner's hand.

  "Yesterday, when I saw the treaty and all the false things in it," he said, "I was mad, and I suppose it made you the same. . Now I am pleased. . . We have thirty-two nations and have a council house, just the same as you have. We held a council before we came here, and the demand I have made upon you is from the chiefs I left behind. We are all alike."

  The meeting ended in a spirit of friendliness, with Red Cloud asking Donehogawa to tell the Great Father he had no further business with him; he was ready to board the Iron Horse and go home.

  Secretary Cox, all smiles now, informed Red Cloud that the government had planned a visit for the Sioux in New York on their way home.

  "I do not want to go that way,” Red Cloud replied. “I want a straight line. I have seen enough of towns. . . . I have no business in New York. I want to go back the way I came.

  The whites are the same everywhere. I see them every day.” Later, when he was told that he had been invited to make a speech to the people of New York, Red Cloud changed his mind. He went to New York, and was astonished by the tumultuous ovation the audience gave him at Cooper Institute. For the first time he had an opportunity to talk to people instead of government officials. "We want to keep peace," he told them. "Will you help us? In 1868 men came out and brought papers. We could not read them, and they did not tell us truly what w
as in them. We thought the treaty was to remove the forts, and that we should cease from fighting. But they wanted to send us traders on the Missouri. We did not want to go to the Missouri, but wanted traders where we were. When I reached Washington the Great Father explained to me what the treaty was, and showed me that the interpreters had deceived me. All I want is right and just. I have tried to get from the Great Father what is right and just. I have not altogether succeeded."

  Red Cloud indeed had not altogether succeeded in getting what he believed was right and just. Although he returned to Fort Laramie with the good feeling that he had many white friends in the East, he found many white enemies waiting for him in the West. Land seekers, ranchers, freighters, settlers, and others were opposed to a Sioux agency anywhere near the rich Platte Valley, and they made their influence felt in Washington.

  Through the summer and autumn of 1870, Red Cloud, with his lieutenant, Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, worked hard for peace. At the request of Donehogawa, the commissioner, they rounded up dozens of powerful chiefs and brought them into Fort Laramie for a council that was supposed to decide the location of the Sioux agency. They persuaded Dull Knife and Little Wolf of the Northern Cheyennes; Plenty Bear of the Northern Arapahos; Chief Grass of the Blackfoot Sioux; and Big Foot of the Minneconjous, who had always been suspicious of white men, to join them.

  Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapas would have nothing to do with any kind of treaty or reservation. "The white people have put bad medicine over Red Cloud's eyes," he said, "to make him see everything and anything they please."

  Sitting Bull underestimated Red Cloud's shrewd tenacity.

  When the Oglala leader discovered at the council that government officials wanted to put the Sioux agency forty miles north of the Platte at Raw Hide Buttes, he would have none of it. "When you go back to the Great Father," he told the officials, "tell him Red Cloud is not willing to go to Raw Hides Buttes." Thereupon he went off to the Powder River country for the winter, confident that Donehogawa the Iroquois would set matters right in Washington.

  The power of Commissioner Ely Parker was waning, however. In Washington, his white enemies were closing in on him,

  Although Red Cloud's stubborn determination secured a temporary agency for the Sioux thirty-two miles east of Fort Laramie on the Platte, they were permitted to use it for less than two years. By that time Donehogawa was gone from Washington. In 1873 the Sioux agency was moved out of the path of the surging flood of white emigration to the headwaters of White River in northwestern Nebraska.

  Spotted Tail and his Brules also were permitted to move from Dakota to the same area. Within a year or so, Camp Robinson was established nearby, and the military would dominate the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail agencies through the troublesome years ahead.

  A few weeks after Red Cloud's visit to Washington in 1870, Donehogawa's troubles began in earnest. His reforms had created enemies among political bosses (the so-called Indian Ring) who had long been using the Indian Bureau as a lucrative branch of the spoils system. His thwarting of the Big Horn mining expedition, a group of white frontiersmen who wanted to open the Sioux treaty lands, created enemies in the West. (The Big Horn Association was formed in Cheyenne, and its members believed in Manifest Destiny: "The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The wealth that for untold ages has lain hidden beneath the snow-capped summits of our mountains has been placed there by Providence to reward the brave spirits whose lot it is to compose the advance-guard of civilization.

  The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed by the ever advancing and ever increasing tide of emigration. The destiny of the aborigines is written in characters not to be mistaken. The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America.")

  In the summer of 1870, a small band of Donehogawa’s enemies in Congress attempted to embarrass him by delaying appropriations of funds for purchase of supplies for reservation Indians. By midsummer telegrams began arriving daily in his office from agents pleading for foodstuffs so that hungry Indians would not be forced to break away in search of wild game. Some agents predicted violence if food could not be supplied quickly.

  The commissioner responded by purchasing supplies on credit without the delay of advertising for bids. Then he arranged for hasty transportation at slightly higher prices than the contract rates. Only in this way could the reservation Indians have received their rations in time to prevent starvation. Donehogawa, however, had broken a few minor regulations, and this gave his enemies the chance they had been waiting for.

  Unexpectedly, the first attack came from William Welsh, a merchant and part-time missionary to the Indians. Welsh had been one of the first members of the watchdog Board of Indian Commissioners, but resigned soon after accepting the appointment. His reasons for resignation were made clear in December, 1870, when he wrote a letter for publication in several Washington newspapers. Welsh charged the commissioner with “fraud and improvidence in the conduct of Indian affairs,” and blamed President Grant for putting into office a man “who is but a remove from barbarism." It was evident that Welsh believed the Indians went on the warpath because they were not Christians, and therefore his solution to the Indian problem was to convert all of them to Christianity. When he discovered that Ely Parker (Donehogawa) was tolerant of the Indians' primitive religions, he took a violent dislike to the "heathen" commissioner and resigned.

  As soon as Welsh's letter appeared in print, Donehogawa's political enemies seized upon it as a perfect opportunity to remove him from office. Within a week the House of Representatives' Committee on Appropriations adopted a resolution to inquire into the charges against the commissioner of Indian Affairs, and summoned him to a grilling that continued for days. Welsh submitted a list of thirteen charges of misconduct, which Donehogawa had to prove were unfounded. At the end of the inquiry, however, the commissioner was exonerated of all charges and was complimented for convincing the Indian tribes "that the government is in earnest, and that it may be trusted," and thus saving the Treasury millions of dollars by avoiding another war on the Plains.

  Only Donehogawa's closest friends knew how agonizing the entire affair had been to him. He considered Welsh's attack a betrayal, especially the implication that as an Indian "but remove from barbarism" he was not fit to serve as Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

  For several months he debated what his next course of action should be. Above all he wanted to help the advancement of his race, but if he remained in office with political enemies constantly sniping at him because he was an Indian himself, he feared that he might do his people more harm than good. He also wondered if his continuance in office might not be a political embarrassment to his old friend President Grant.

  Late in the summer of 1871 he turned in his resignation.

  Privately he told friends he was leaving because he had become "a rock of offense." Publicly he said he wanted to go into business to better provide for his family. As he had foreseen, the press attacked him, intimating that he must have been a member of the "Indian Ring" himself, a Judas to his own people

  Donehogawa shrugged it all off; after half a century he had grown accustomed to the white man's prejudices' He went to New York City, made himself a fortune in that Gilded Age of finance, and lived out his life as Donehogawa, Keeper of the Western Door of the Long House of the Iroquois.

  Nine

  Cochise and the Apache Guerrillas

  1871-January 28, Paris capitulates to German Army. March 18, Communist uprising in Paris. May 10, Franco-German peace treaty signed; France cedes Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. May 28, uprising in Paris is suppressed. October 8, the Great Chicago Fire. October 12, President Grant issues proclamation against Ku Klux KIan. November 10, in Africa, Henry M. Stanley finds Dr. Livingstone. Impressionist painters hold first exhibition in Paris. Darwin’s Descent of Man is published.

  1872-March 1, Yello
wstone National park is reserved for the people of the United States. James Fisk’s and Jay Gould’s corrupt Erie Ring collapses. June, U.S. Congress abolishes federal income tax. October, leading Republicans accused of receiving stock of Credit Mobilier in exchange for political influence to benefit Union Pacific Railroad.

  November E, in Rochester, N.Y. Susan B. Anthony and other women’s-rights advocates arrested for attempting to vote.

  November 6, president Grant reelected

  When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die-that they carry their lives on their fingernails? They roam over the hills and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails.

  -Cochise of the Chiricahua Apaches

  I don't want to run over the mountains anymore; I want to make a big treaty. . . . I will keep my word until the stones melt. . . .God made the white man and God made the Apache, and the Apache has just as much right to the country as the white man. I want to make a treaty that will last, so that both can travel over the country and have no trouble.

  -Delshay of the Tonto Apaches

  - If it had not been for the massacre, there would have been a great many more people here now; but after that massacre who could have stood it? When I made peace with Lieutenant Whitman my heart was very big and happy. The people of Tucson and San Xavier must be crazy.

  They acted as though they had neither heads nor hearts. .

  .they must have a thirst for our blood. . . These Tucson people write for the papers and tell their own story. The Apaches have no one to tell their story.